Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

RHEL is a Linux distribution produced by Red Hat and targeted towards the commercial market. Red Hat commits to supporting each version of RHEL for 7 years after its release. All of Red Hat's official support for various versions, all of Red Hat's training and the Red Hat Certification Program center on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform are available.

New versions of RHEL are released every 18 to 24 months. When Red Hat releases a new version of RHEL, customers may upgrade to the new version at no additional charge as long as they are in possession of a current subscription (i.e. the subscription term has not yet lapsed).

Red Hat's first Enterprise offering (Red Hat Linux 6.2E) essentially consisted of a version of Red Hat Linux 6.2 with different support levels, and without separate engineering.The first version of RHEL to bear the name originally came onto the market as "Red Hat Linux Advanced Server". In 2003 Red Hat rebranded Red Hat Linux Advanced Server to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" (RHEL) AS, and added two more variants, RHEL ES and RHEL WS.

Originally, Red Hat based RHEL on Red Hat Linux, but using a much more conservative release cycle. Later versions leveraged technologies from Federo which is a community distribution and project that Red Hat sponsors. Roughly every third version of Red Hat Linux(RHL) or Fedora forms the basis for a version of RHEL.

• RHL 6.2 → RHL 6.2E
• RHL 7.2 → RHEL 2.1
• RHL 9 → RHEL 3
• FC 3 → RHEL 4
• FC 6 → RHEL 5
• Fedora 9 → RHEL 6 (projected)